Split group_vars/ENVIRONMENT into smaller files

[nathanielks]

Hey all-

Was reading up on group variables and realized they can be split into smaller files. Feast your eyeballs: http://docs.ansible.com/intro_inventory.html#splitting-out-host-and-group-specific-data.

This would be great in the context of wanting to separate things out for security concerns as we could set the project up to more easily be used by ansible-vault. Just a thought!

[swalkinshaw]

Any proposals for new files?

[nathanielks]

@austinpray LOL.

@swalkinshaw I've been thinking about this and have a few different ideas. First would be the simplest, have a main.yml and an encrypted.yml. Store everything you don't mind in plaintext in main, everything that needs to be secure in encrypted ( could solve our nginx ssl storage issue? ). Second would be scope it based on roles. If a role doesn't need vars overridden, don't add another file. Examples below.

First:

group_vars/development/main.yml
group_vars/development/encrypted.yml

Second:

group_vars/development/wordpress-sites.yml
group_vars/development/php.yml
group_vars/development/nginx.yml

[swalkinshaw]

We'll revisit this once the deploys PR and some cleanup is done. Roles/playbooks are changing due to deploys anyway but I think it makes sense to have the vars split up more.